


if you're gonna hurt me, why don't you hurt me a little bit more?

by fawnlike (amainiris)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Lesbian Character, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-11 17:51:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19932082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amainiris/pseuds/fawnlike
Summary: “Together forever, right, bitch?” Marissa asks, and for a moment Abigail is practically drowning--in the pores of her skin, the strange shyness of her smile (Marissa is never shy, never), the clever look in her darkened eyes.





	if you're gonna hurt me, why don't you hurt me a little bit more?

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Was absolutely wasted when I wrote this, so don't expect anything of quality.
> 
> That said, read on....

In the careful stillness of a summer night, Abigail traces the lines of her friend’s fingers in the grass. Skeletons, she thinks. Bird bones.

She looks up and catches Marissa’s glimpse and feels something not unlike pleasure rise to the surface of her skin.

“Together forever, right, bitch?” Marissa asks, and for a moment Abigail is practically drowning--in the pores of her skin, the strange shyness of her smile (Marissa is never shy, never), the clever look in her darkened eyes. 

“Forever.” And then comes the laughter that only Marissa can elicit, that stupid childish girl-giggle, and Marissa is reaching for her and cradling her like an infant and Abigail thinks, so briefly, that neither of her parents have ever been so loving. 

“I’ll never leave you,” Marissa says, and for some reason these words hold the weight of a hundred thousand promises. Abigail, never a crier, has to briefly close her eyes.

“Never,” she says, blinking them open again, the world thrown into a spiral of dizzy lights. “Of course not.”

Marissa’s kiss is strangely soft, almost as soft as the gauzy halo of her loam-dark hair.

She was taught that feelings like these were wrong.

She was also taught that a lot of truly terrible things were right.

Abigail is the only one towards whom Marissa is soft, and the inverse is also true. This should bother her.

But it doesn't. 

To her, Marissa was never anything less than beautiful.

Not even when Abigail sees her strung up like an animal, like some Nordic pantomime of torture, and all the breath leaves her lungs in great hungry gasps. In her father’s cabin, in his space, where he tortured girls-who-were-not-Marissa. Girls-who-were-not-Abigail.

The antlers strike her the most, and then she’s collapsing, as if Marissa was one of the deer she hunted alongside her father, nothing more than a pretty face and soft pelt, nothing more than those sweet doe eyes. All of which Marissa had been, yes--

But there had been so much more to her, too--her out-of-tune guitar, the way she’d hum barely-recognizable songs underneath her breath, her rough-low laugh, like a boy’s. The strange sweetness of her smile.

Love comes only once, Abigail has been told, and in that moment she rails against it, how cliche it sounds, how true it is. 

But some part of her believes she’d rather live one lifetime with Marissa in it than a dozen without her.

It all comes out eventually.

It always does.

Hannibal, dressed carefully in his plastic suit, with his careful knife and his careful eyes, confesses to Abigail that he will kill her. That he killed Marissa.

Where anger should thud there is only a dull recognition.

“And me?” Her voice is high and thin and she hates it.

He draws close then, cradles her face to him and kisses her forehead in a way that is neither brotherly nor fatherly, nor particularly indecent. But Abigail flinches away anyway, because he’s not Marissa, he’s not one of the half dozen girls she’d crushed on in school. He is diligent and proud and beautiful but he is not them, and she doesn't want him to be.

“Just do it,” she says finally, having evaded his kiss. The appropriate anger is thrumming hot and vicious in her veins now, and it's a blessed comfort.

“Do what, Abigail?”

“Kill me,” she says, and he almost hesitates. If Hannibal were someone else, she would have thought that something in her voice has temporarily undone him. But Abigail has never been that stupid. “You already have, and you know it, don't you?”

Silence.

And then the knife is going to the ear, so eager the surgeon is to take things apart and not put them back together. Abigail closes her eyes, imagines Marissa and her guitar, her piano, the rough-low sound of her voice. 

When the knife cuts she feels nothing.

Nothing but what she imagines Marissa felt upon those antlers, not so long ago.


End file.
